TechCrunch, Mashable, Techmeme & Wired sends the linklove

I’ve been watching my servers groan and moan as my blog has been featured on the homepages of Techcrunch, Mashable, and Techmeme today — all sites that I am a big fan of and I read regularly. My favourite magazine…

I’ve been watching my servers groan and moan as my blog has been featured on the homepages of Techcrunch, Mashable, and Techmeme today — all sites that I am a big fan of and I read regularly. My favourite magazine Wired, then also blogged about it here.

They are linking to the post I wrote Wednesday morning that broke the news and speculated that Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales may be looking at some kind of Facebook rival or a social network/search hybrid (whatever that may be). It was based on a talk Wales gave to about 100 top local geeks at a Johannesburg iCommons event on Tuesday, at which I also had the privilege of speaking at, just before the Jimmy himself.

So on Thursday morning, Mashable, the world’s seventh biggest blog, and then Techmeme, picked up on the post. As the trackbacks started flowing in, I decided later that morning to hunt down a picture of the actual screenshot which my own camera seemed to have missed… I first contacted the organisers and sent out a few emails to fellow bloggers, at which point blogger Paul Jacobson alerted me to the fact that co-blogger Nic Haralambous, who was also at the event, had the shot — which I then linked to from my post. Meanwhile Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch, the world’s third biggest blog according to Technorati, came through with a post.

[…] Jimmy Wales in South Africa Wikipedia boss, Jimmy Wales, who has now visited this country three times in under a year to do interviews and speak at events revealed details of his new search project, which looked more like a Facebook profile than anything else. His revelation in this country led to worldwide speculation (and an attempt by Mashable, techcrunch, techmeme and wired.com to break my blog servers) about what exactly he was up to. He was brought into the country by Heather Ford under the auspices of iCommons. […]